Monica Colvig

COAFCC Secretary
Questions posed by Katie Hays

Tiah Terranova, Psy.D., LP
 

Anxiety is omnipresent in life. There is no escaping this fact. Stress is everywhere and the majority of life is outside of your control, but you do have control over your thoughts, feelings, behaviors and reactions to impact of the human condition one moment at a time. For those who are in the practice of serving others, it is paramount to make efforts to remain physically and mentally healthy in order continue to serve others and care for yourself without harming yourself in the process.

Allostatic load is a term referring to the cumulative toll that chronic stress and life events take on the body. When this load is too high our bodies become unable to cope.  Allostatic overload can occur, resulting in increased occurrences of anxiety, depression, gastrointestinal difficulties, inflammation and muscle tension, sleep disturbance, diabetes, headaches, hair loss, and acne, just to name a few. This is not for the faint of heart. If you keep pushing through and ignoring all your body’s alarms you will likely continue to deteriorate, resulting in decreased quality and length of life.

In order to continue the meaningful and difficult work many of you do and simply to care for yourself on this journey through life, here are a few suggestions that may aid in lessening the allostatic load.  These  are simple additions to incorporate into your busy days:

• Avoid eating when you are stressed, as the body does not digest food when the stress response is activated. Try to eat when you are in a relaxed state. Taking a few deep breaths prior to eating can help activate the relaxation response in the body.

There are many types of difficult cases that come before the Domestic Relations courts in divorce/separation and post-decree hearings. The most sensitive are cases where parental behaviors put children at risk or are harm children and/or the parent-child relationship. The harm, in the present or in the past, has so damaged the parent/child relationship that there needs to be a process for healing and growth.  Judges are in the position of needing to order interventions to repair these relationships, and at the same time protect children as well as respect a parent’s constitutional right to parent their child.

Risk or damage in these cases can be anything from emotional harm, psychological damage, physical risk from abuse and collateral damage from, for instance, drug or alcohol abuse, exposure to and witnessing intense parental conflict, to putting children into loyalty binds, where they cannot love both parents.

Judges have the ability to use Child and Family Investigators, Parental Responsibility Evaluators, and educational experts to understand the dynamics in each family, but when the final decisions have to be made, the court has to order interventions that may include treatment interventions and parenting time in a multiplicity of patterns.